Monday, May 18, 2015

Open Context Upgrade Progress

Last summer, we launched a major programming effort to upgrade Open
Context. The upgrade involves completely rewriting all of Open Context’s
software so as to more efficiently scale Open Context and take
advantage of technology standards that have emerged to prominence since
our last major upgrade back in 2009-2011.

We’ve now deployed the new version of Open Context on a testing /
development server generously provided by the German Archaeological
Institute (DAI). The new testing / development version is hosted here: http://opencontext.dainst.org/

The most important “back-end” aspects of the new version of Open
Context are in place and functioning. We still need to add several
user-interface features, site documentation, and some data visualization
features, so this is still a work-in-progress. We are also still
testing mapping interface features against different browsers, noting
bugs, and addressing issues that cause confusion or broken
functionality. If you notice any bugs or have suggestions for
improvement, please make raise issues and comments at our source-code repository!

A major reason for our upgrade centers on the need to more fully implement Linked Open Data
methods for interoperability. We’ll write more on these developments
shortly, but for now, we’ll highlight how the new version of Open
Context is starting to use linked data to situate content in more
clearly defined temporal contexts. We are now testing use of PeriodO URIs for chronological metadata. PeriodO (a project led by Adam Rabinowitz, Ryan Shaw
and Open Context’s Eric Kansa) provides a framework and data model for
researches and other authorities (data repositories, museums, etc.) to
publish assertions about time periods. Here’s an example of items in Open Context relating to the “Orientalizing” period in Italy, as modeled by PeriodO.

The new API (application program interface) for Open Context is now
fully implemented (except for finishing touches on files that define
certain namespaces). Already, the API is supporting original research,
including this intriguing text-analysis and topic modeling project
launched by Shawn Graham (described here and here and other places). In addition, Ben Marwick,Lincoln Mullen and Scott Chamberlain other colleagues with rOpenScience have started developing an rStats package built on top of Open Context‘s
new API. This rStats package is particularly exciting, since it can
open a whole new world of statistical analyses and data visualization.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.